“Outstanding work in the humanities and social sciences”
29. April 2009
Through this program, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the German Foreign Office support the translation of works into English that are important for Germany’s role as a center of scholarship. One of the program’s major goals is to maintain German as a language for both scholarship in general and for the first publication of works in the humanities and social sciences. Since 2008, 400,000 euros have been allotted annually over two application rounds. This spring, the sum of 200,000 euros has been divided among 14 publications.
The Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Integration” at the University of Konstanz has offered a research framework for the historian Jürgen Osterhammel and the specialist in politics and administration Philip Manow. On the basis of similar considerations, the Center itself offers funding for English-language translation. At present, for example, support is being offered for the translation of standard works on cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, first published in 1992 and 1999, to be published together in a single edition by Cambridge University Press (Aleida Assmann: Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich 1999. Jan Assmann: Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich 1992). In addition, support is being offered for both the translation into English of Uwe Hebekus’s book on modernist aesthetics and politics, “Ästhetische Ermächtigung. Zum politischen Ort der Literatur im Zeitraum der Klassischen Moderne” (Munich 2009) and the translation into Italian of Sven Reichardt’s book on violent organizations in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, “Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA” (Cologne etc. 2002).